Women Librarians' and managers' Experiences in Combining Work and Family

Are women in a female-dominated profession (librarians) more successfully able to combine work and family obligations than women in a male-dominated profession (business managers)? To explore this question, a comparison was made between the marital status and number of children of 447 women managers and 557 women librarians.It was expected that the librarians would marry earlier and have more often married and after controlling for age, there were no differences in number of children. Librarians were marginally less likely to have been unemployed, and more often worked part time. But the reasons in both groups were often lack of work rather than a choice made for family reasons. Librarians salaries were much less. Other analyses assessed the determinants of income for the two groups of women. The negative impact of not working full time was minimal for both groups